Smithsonian Magazine March 2026

In Awe of Artemis I can hardly wait for Artemis 2 to launch (“Back to the Future,” January/February 2026). The SLS booster engine, with a million more pounds of thrust than the Apollo’s Saturn V engine, is mind-boggling to me. How the crew handles it with their stamina and endurance will be amazing. God speed, Artemis 2, for a very safe journey. I know I’ll be watching. Tommy Fritz | Baldwinsville, New York I have been following the progress of the Artemis program with great interest for some time. Most articles have been rather dry, technical accounts, but your article brought the program to life. I was fascinated to learn about the procedures for testing the safety of the multiple systems involved in the spacecraft and how problems are added…

FOR DECADES, amateur cryptographers tapped their pencils, programmed their computers and stared intently at the seemingly random letters of Kryptos, a bewildering puzzle structure created by sculptor James Sanborn in 1990 that now stands at the CIA headquarters, in McLean, Virginia. By the new millennium, three panels of the artwork had been deciphered, but the final one remained elusive—until now. It turns out that the solution was scrawled on scraps of paper accidentally tucked away by Sanborn at the Archives of American Art, where two journalists stumbled across them in September. The discovery—through library science rather than code-cracking—has irreversibly changed the legacy of Kryptos. John Schwartz, a journalist who has written about the sculpture since 1999, notes that you don’t have to be James Bond to solve cases. Many amateur…

T WAS HARDLY a typical state dinner. On June 11, 1939, George VI of England attended a picnic retreat at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s residence in Hyde Park, New York, where the king, for the first time in his life, tasted a hot dog. The treats arrived on silver platters. After polishing off his first dog, the king went back for a second, and Washington, D.C.’s Times-Herald celebrated this expression of Anglo-American solidarity: “Today we can bellow down the Coney Island boardwalk, our voices uplifted in pride, that the hot dog truly makes the whole world kin.” The hot dog’s great success has always transcended class, wrapping the modern history of the United States into a portable bun. It all began with the five million German immigrants who arrived in…

A HARE-RAISING APPETITE In the 17th century, an English farmer named Nicholas Wood (above) was seen devouring 60 eggs and a quarter of a lamb. It was a routine meal for Wood, who was known as the “Great Eater of Kent.” According to the poet John Taylor, Wood once consumed seven dozen rabbits in one sitting—a feast Taylor estimated would’ve fed 168 soldiers. Whenever Wood ate publicly at fairs and festivals, nobles delighted in betting on his stomach. By the end of Wood’s life, he had just one tooth left. He’d lost most of the others while eating an entire mutton shoulder, bones and all. WEIGHT OF THE UNION The late 19th century begat colorful associations formed on the basis of poundage, which became known as Fat Men’s Clubs. These…

JAZZ LEGEND Dizzy Gillespie dubbed his good friend Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) “the bop artist . . . in the sense that she has taken the essence of our music and transported it into another art form.” During her lifetime, Abercrombie was best known for hosting salons—and rollicking jam sessions—at her Chicago brownstone, frequented by a diverse who’s-who of the city’s mid-century bohemian scene. Still, the self-taught painter, who claimed to be inspired mostly by dreams, “never considered herself an insider to the art world,” says Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, curator of American art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which will host “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery,” the largest-ever traveling retrospective of Abercrombie’s mysterious canvases, beginning in March. He adds that although she enjoyed playing with labels—whether “bop artist” or…

AS THE CLOCKS struck noon on January 11, 1937, roughly 100 men camped on the second floor of a Flint auto plant suddenly found themselves without heat. Under normal circumstances, there might have been 1,000 workers inside the Fisher No. 2 facility, bustling to produce auto bodies, sending 450 of them to a Chevrolet assembly facility across the road every 24 hours. But the day’s more austere climate owed itself to decidedly unusual circumstances. On December 30, the men inside the plant had joined fellow workers in a daring strike action with the aim of forcing a reluctant General Motors to recognize their union, the United Auto Workers (UAW). Eschewing the traditional method of picketing outside, their primary chosen tactic—the sitdown strike—was as disruptive as it was rare. As Greg…